The Holy Spirit

Joyce: Something I think is interesting — I don’t know how you feel about this but I think a lot of people don’t even really know how they feel about themselves; it’s not even any kind of dialogue they ever have with themselves. I know I didn’t realize I didn’t like myself.

Dr. Mintle: So because you didn’t know how you were feeling about yourself, you didn’t connect the way you were behaving to that at all? It wasn’t even related?

Joyce: not at all. Not at all. It was just like I never even thought about that and when I started realizing that I didn’t like myself, I didn’t just start realizing; God had to show me that through books I was reading and the word of God. There’s a scripture in first peter 3:10-11 that talks about how you need to have peace with God, peace with yourself and peace with your fellowman. The bible really is a book about relationships; it’s about our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with people, and i think sometimes we get the God part and the people part but we don’t realize that we have an intimate relationship with ourselves and that is affected by the relationship we have with God, but then how we get along with people is directly affected by how we feel about ourselves.

Dr. Mintle: When you didn’t realize that you were feeling bad about yourself, were you always looking at other people to make things better?

Joyce: Oh, yeah.  Everything was everybody else’s fault. “I would be happier if you did this and i wouldn’t get upset if you wouldn’t do that.” I never took any personal responsibility for anything and just to find out that my joy was not somebody else’s responsibility!

Dr. Mintle: And it wasn’t about all those other people and what they were and weren’t doing; it was really about the way you saw yourself and felt about yourself.

Joyce: exactly.  All of the bad fruit in my life was coming from the bad root that I had inside of me and until I took responsibility for that, there was no helping me.

Dr. Mintle: and that’s hard to do sometimes because sometimes when we’re looking at who we are and what we see inside there, we don’t always like it. It’s almost like I like to think of the holy spirit sort of shining a light like a flashlight on different rooms in our house; he’s looking in and going: I don’t know. Something in the attic there needs to be cleaned out. You don’t always like what you see, so looking at who you really are, it’s easier to think these other people are making my life miserable but it’s harder to say maybe I yell and scream at people and that’s one of the reasons why they’re not so nice, or maybe I’m not treating somebody well and maybe that’s why they’re reacting to me the way they are.

Joyce: So I’ll go back and do that right away and what that does is, people respect you when you do that.